Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw | Norman Davies

Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw | Norman Davies | A work of Art

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Rising '44: The Ba...

	Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw Norman Davies Viking Adult, 2004 - 784 pages average customer review:based on 47 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In August 1944, Warsaw presented the last major obstacle to the Red Army?s triumphant march from Moscow to Berlin. When the Wehrmacht was pushed back to the Vistula River, the Polish Resistance poured forty thousand fighters into the streets to drive out the hated Germans. But Stalin halted the Russian offensive, allowing the Wehrmacht to regroup and destroy the city. For sixty-three days Soviet troops and other Allied forces watched from the sidelines as tens of thousands of Poles were slaughtered and Warsaw was reduced to rubble.

Like Antony Beevor?s bestselling The Fall of Berlin, Rising ?44 is a brilliant narrative of one of the most dramatic episodes in twentieth-century history.

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thrice betrayed

On the surface, this book is a very detailed and thorough description of the Warsaw uprising against the German occupation in the autumn of 1944. It deals not only with those extremely bloody events themselves, but also with the political situation that had brought them about and the even uglier aftermath of the fighting.

Norman Davies knows his material extremely well and brings life into all aspects of the question, be it the day-to-day conditions of the inhabitants of the Polish capital under German rule, the political activities of the Polish government in exile in London, the material preparation of the insurgency, the reaction of the German side or the difficulty of aiding the insurgents from far away.

The author also elaborates on the long-standing enmity of the Poles, especially those on the side of the Home Army, and the Soviets which had erupted a generation earlier into a bitter fight when the Bolsheviks tried to break through Poland into the centre of Europe, only to be repulsed on the very banks of the Vistula where they stood once again in 1944, but now with an extremely powerful and battle-hardened army the Poles could not hope to defeat a second time.

The snippets depicting the fighters and their helpers, which crop up in the text, not so much like photographs but rather like the artistical drawings we see in old newspapers, are extremely touching and allow the reader to feel his way into the tumultuous scenes and to establish an almost personal presence.

Aside from giving an extremely vivid and detailed account of the day-to-day fighting, the author describes the pitiful efforts of the Allies to help the Warsaw fighters by an air-lift from southern Italy, an extremely thin line of supply at best, with most of the provisions coming down on the wrong side of the front-lines.

The rising, as we all know, ended in tragedy, but if we listen attentively to what is being said in this book beyond the mere description of battle scenes, we discover a deeper and quite disconcerting meaning: The state of Poland that was re-created at Versailles was never an aim in itself for Britain. It was set up as part of a network of states intended to keep Germany at bay and to ensure that the centre of Europe would remain an unstable area that could be manipulated from the outside, militarily or politically, as the situation might require.

The country was used as a pawn in 1939 to allow London to go to war against Hitler on the pretext of a guarantee pressed upon Warsaw, but this guarantee was never meant to be exercised in any practical way, nor could it have been, and Poland was allowed to go down in the process. Five years later, when there was the hint of a chance to restore Poland in the face of the Soviet steam roller, it was betrayed twice over - first the Germans were allowed to crush the rebellion and then the Soviets could not be prevented from annihilating any form of Polish independence.

It is, in a way, quite ironical that - as we may gather from Norman Davies' account - the Germans were the only party to this foul game to treat the Poles squarely: not with kindness, far from it, but at least with some degree of honesty, as enemies intitially, and later even with due respect once the fighters of the Polish Home Army had agreed to identify themselves as such. The surrender of General Bor was a negotiated arrangement, the surviving fighters were treated as prisoners of war with many of them living to see the end of the war in German captivity, the non-combatants were let go.

The fate of those members of the Home Army who happened to fall into the hands of the Soviets was totally different: if they were not shot outright, they were made to stand trial and were sentenced very severely, especially the officers, most of whom never returned from the Gulag.

Perhaps the German actions were guided by a German film, "The Warsaw Citadel", produced in 1937. Its scenario is based on a Polish play, dramatising one of the many rebellions against Tsarist rule, the heroes are depicted as Polish patriots, many scenes were shot on location in Warsaw, obviously with the blessings of the Polish government. For some obscure reason, this film is still blacklisted in Germany - possibly because some people want to keep history from becoming too complicated ...

"Rising `44" helps the reader to maintain a critical attitude with respect to the history of the Second World War.

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A work of Art

Norman Davies gives us a work of art in Rising 44. We expect impeccable research from one of the world's top historians and we're not disappointed. But the imaginative, thoughtful treatment of this important subject goes beyond history and into art.

Provides Good Political Context but Weak on Military Aspects

Although the uprising of the Polish Home Army against the German occupation in Warsaw in August 1944 was one of the most tragic incidents of the Second World War, it has not been well-covered in English for a variety of reasons. One reason has been the difficulty of accessing Polish records, particularly during the period of communist rule. Another reason has been the culpability of the Soviet, British and American policy makers in abetting Poland's destruction at the hands of the Nazis. Along comes British academic historian Norman Davies - well known for his history of Poland - who has the ability to access Polish language sources and who is not afraid to call out the wartime Allies for their mistakes (and misdeeds). Davies' book Rising '44: the Battle for Warsaw is a bold and well-written attempt to set the historical record straight, to expurgate the lies told by communist historians and to inform the Western public that VE Day did not mean liberation for all the Allies. Overall, Davies' book is well-written - although a bit quirky - and should serve its purposes to illuminate a subject that has been virtually taboo for decades. Unfortunately, Rising '44 actually has relatively little detail on the actual fighting in Warsaw and it does not include some of the better Polish first-person accounts that are now available. For military historians and serious researchers, this book is a disappointment and poorly organized, although it has useful background information on the political situation.

Warsaw '44 is divided into three broad sections: before the rising (225 pages), the rising (160 pages) and after the rising (205 pages). The first section, which covers the Western Allies, the German occupation, the Soviet advance toward Poland and the emergence of the Polish resistance, is easily the best part of the book. Davies is clearly in his element describing the complex web of Soviet-Polish-British negotiations during 1939-44 and how the Soviets connived to undermine the Polish Government in Exile and the British allowed this to happen. At times Davies appears to assail his own country's Foreign Office with glee and one senses a certain sense of guilt that is being exorcised on these pages. The second section on the uprising itself is the shortest in the book and the least detailed. I was dismayed to see Davies' narrative trail off quickly after the first day of the uprising and he makes no effort to provide anything like a comprehensive history of the 63 days of the uprising. Even more frustrating is the author's penchant for inserting numerous sidebar sections on diverse subjects (some of which are quite good) which only serves to break up the narrative flow. Many of the sidebars don't deliver much; the one on the capture of a Panther tank by the Home Army fails to provide any information on where or how this occurred, even though the information is readily available in Polish sources. The final section on the post-war period covers the communist repression that punished the Polish insurgents and concealed the truth of the uprising for over 40 years.

One of the quirky aspects of this book is the way in which the author attempts to `dumb down' or Anglicize Polish names so that Western readers will not be put off. These seems like a publisher's desire to sell more books rather than the technique of a serious historian and it becomes quite grating to see repeated references to "Premier Mick" and see Warsaw's street names Anglicized. On the plus side, the author is a prodigious researcher and he adds a wealth of information in the footnotes and appendices, as well as a number of decent maps (although only one or two depict German/Polish unit dispositions).

The biggest weakness of Rising '44 is the slim coverage it provides on the actual military fighting as well as the scale of the atrocities that the Germans committed in Warsaw. The fact that the Wola massacre on 5-6 August 1944 was the largest battlefield atrocity committed in Europe during the Second World War is not even mentioned. Specific actions, like the fight for the PWPW building in the New Town or the ZUS building in Czerniakow, do not appear on these pages. Key villains such as Oskar Dirlewanger rate barely a few sentences in this book and a number of significant Polish Home Army leaders are omitted entirely. If you are looking for a good military history of the uprising in English, it remains to be written.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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